Larval Subjects

Larvae are creatures in a process of becoming or development that have not yet actualized themselves in a specific form. This space is a space for the incubation of philosophical larvae that are yet without determinate positions or commitments but which are in a process of unfolding.

31 August 2006

Foucault and Zizek... Again (UPDATED)

In a disproportianately influential passage from Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes,

Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it. Hume's famous thesis takes us to the heart of a problem: since it implies, in principle, a perfect independence on the part of each presentation, how can repetition change something in the case of the repeated element? The rule of discontinuity or instantaneity in repetition tells us that one instance does not appear unless the other has disappeared-- hence the status of matter as mens momentanea. However, given that repetition disappears even as it occurs, how can we say 'the second', 'the third' and 'it is the same'? It has no in-itself. On the other hand, it does not change something in the mind which contemplates it. This is the essence of the modification. Hume takes as an example the repetition of the cases of the type AB, AB, AB, A... . Each case of objective sequence AB is independent of the others. The repetition (although we cannot yet properly speak of repetition) changes nothing in the object or the state of affairs AB. On the other hand, a change is produced in the mind which contemplates: a difference, something new in the mind. Whenever A appears, I expect the appearance of B." (DR, 70)

Deleuze refers to this synthesis of repetition as habitus. The basic idea is very simple and straightforward-- through the repetition of cases, the mind is led to anticipate what will occur next (B when I experience A) and retend what came before (A when I am now experiencing B). For instance, when I hear tick, I expect to hear tock and when I hear the first few notes of a song, I anticipate the remaining notes. (I say that this passage has been disproportionately influential as there's been a tendency to reduce Deleuze's transcendental empiricism to this classical Humean empiricism, ignoring his account of actualization in later chapters of Difference and Repetition which is concerned not with how we perceive or cognize objects as in Kant and Hume, but with the being of beings themselves), as can be seen in the work of Massumi, Baugh, Hadyn, etc. Indeed, Deleuze argues that the synthesis of habitus underlies the model of recognition that covers over difference, which entails that something is deeply amiss with readings of Deleuze that assimilate his account of repetition and difference to this first synthesis of repetition. It should be noted that Deleuze's transcendental empiricism is an ontological account of beings and not an epistemic account of our relation to objects, as is the case with Hume's habits. Therefore, the first synthesis can only be a small part of the story, not the whole of the story. Ironically, there's a tendency to assimilate Deleuze to a repetition of the same in assimilating him to Humean empiricism and ignoring his genuinely metaphysical claims... Hume staunchly rejecting metaphysics).

The key feature not to be missed with regard to habitus is that the system of anticipations and retentions formed as a result of this synthesis cannot be resisted once they are in place. I cannot not anticipate "tock" when I hear "tick". New habits might emerge as a result of experiencing new repetitions, but the synthesis that produces a particular experience of the world all occurs at a sub-cognitive level very close to what Skinner thought of as behavioral conditioning. When I am behaviorally conditioned, my salivation at the sound of a bell has nothing to do with any thought or attitude I might have with respect to the bell, but is rather an automatic response that occurs upon experiencing the bell that I can't help but experience. Indeed, Deleuze writes that, "This is by no means a memory, nor indeed an operation of the understanding: contraction is not a matter of reflection" (DR, 70). Where Kant, in The Critique of Pure Reason, had understood understanding and memory as belonging to the spontaneity of thought or the power of freedom (memory plays a key role in the A Edition version of the transcendental deduction), these "syntheses of time" (ibid.) precede and condition spontaneity, occuring beneath any sort of reflective activity. Deleuze's strategy here is to argue that spontaneity (what he refers to as "active synthesis"), would not even be possible without this passive synthesis that precedes reflective thought.

It is in regard to a conception of cognition such as this that I think we should read Foucault's notorious rejection of ideology as merely the dust kicked up by relations of power, or as an epiphenomenon that fails to get at what is crucial. That Foucault presupposes something like a process of body-formation rendered possible by virtue of the synthesis of habitus comes out most clearly in his analysis of "docile bodies" in Discipline and Punish. There Foucault writes that,

The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body-- to the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces. The great book of Man-the-Machine was written simultaneously on two registers: the anatomico-metaphysical register, of which Descartes wrote the first pages and which the physicians and philosophers continued, and the technico-political register, which was constituted by a whole set of regulations and by empirical and calculated methods relating to the army, the school and the hospital, for controlling and correcting the operations of the body... A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved... To begin with, there was the scale of the control: it was a question not of treating the body, en masse, 'wholesale', as if it were an indissociable unity, but of working it 'retail', individually; of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself-- movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity: an infitesimal power over the active body." (DP, 137)

Foucault's point seems to be that discourse and cognition (active synthesis) are completely circumvented in this formation of the body, such that the body is moulded to act automatically in a particular way in the presence of particular signs, regardless of the attitude the subject in question might have to these "habits". Deleuze gives the example of the movements of a chicken as resulting from this sort of synthesis: "The nods of a chicken's head accompany its cardiac pulsations in an organic synthesis before they serve as pecks in the perceptual synthesis with the grain" (DR, 76). Just as the chicken plays no active role in nodding its head in this way as it searches about for grain but does so automatically by virtue of the system of habits it organically is, the subject resulting from a disciplinary regime of the sort described by Foucault automatically moves and experiences affects in the way that it does as a result of a process of body-formation produced through repetition.

In this regard, I'm led to wonder whether Zizek's shift of ideology from what we think about the world to how we subjectivize what we do in the world ("they know very well, but they're still doing it!"), really hits the mark with regard to Foucault. I am not trying to suggest that Foucault is correct and Zizek is wrong. Rather, I find myself wondering whether active synthesis plays any role at all in the sorts of mechanisms of power Foucault describes. Zizek seems to converge with Foucault when he favorably cites Pascal's dictum "kneel and you'll believe", but here there still seems to be the assumption of a decision to kneel, rather than a recognition of the way in which we're thrown into certain conditioning environments and formed by them, prior to even reflecting on a decision of whether to act as others do (thus raising the question of whether issues of identification are even relevant to understanding certain social formations and attitudes giving the body form). Even if I come to recognize that despite knowing money is merely a sign (and nothing of value in itself), I nonetheless behave towards money in exactly the same way (according to Foucault) as a result of the way in which my body has been formed as a system of habits. That is, changing my attitudes towards money does not change how I behave in relation to money (money probably isn't the best example), since this is a conditioned response, not a decision. I still behave like a chicken in relation to the grain. I am thus curious as to how Zizek might respond to this sort of criticism. Ideology critique can certainly take us far in how we behave towards various aspects of the world, but is it capable of targeting this level of passive synthesis described by Foucault's power structures? Or to take a different example, can I cognitively change the way my body has been formed to recognize certain things as signs producing sexual arousal? Or are these signs, once put in place through passive synthesis, irreversable? Going to extremes, is there a sense in which something like architectual innovation and innovations in how we cut up segments of time can be more productive of change in how bodies relate to one another, than changing how we think or reflect the world about us? For instance, was the shift from hunter-gatherer societies to agrarian societies far more transformative of human relations than transformations in beliefs just because it transformed the experience of time (relating time to seasons and a particular order of activities during the day, rather than understanding time in terms of wandering and rest/hunt relations)? Clearly my ideas are vague here.

UPDATE: I've received some perplexed questions offblog as to why I use the term "passive synthesis" in discussing Deleuze's first synthesis of memory. This is the language Deleuze himself uses in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition, "At the moment when it grounds itself upon habit, memory must be grounded by another passive synthesis distinct from that of habit. The passive synthesis of habit in turn refers to this more profound passive synthesis of memory: Habitus and Mnemosyne, the alliance of the sky and the ground" (DR, 79-80, my italics). Deleuze's point is that these syntheses are an automatic activity of mind that occur without the intentional directedness of an ego or a transcendental subject. The target here is the Cartesian/Kantian/Husserlian tradition which presupposes the active agency of a transcendental subject or ego in all activities of thought (this is especially clear in the Kantian doctrine of judgment, where mind actively subsumes a particular under a universal such as in the judgment "Socrates is a man" using the a priori categories of the understanding as rules presiding over this subsumption). Deleuze's strategy is to argue that ego and the active syntheses rendered possible by ego are emergent properties of sub-representational syntheses that presuppose no unified subject or ego as an agency carrying out these syntheses. In this regard, Deleuze's conception accords with Nietzsche's account of "doing without a doer" and his critique of the ego, in Beyond Good and Evil. From what I've been able to tell, Deleuze derives this specific term from Husserl's Cartesian Meditations (cf. section 18, in meditation 2, entitled "Identification as the Fundamental Form of Synthesis. The All-Embracing Synthesis of Transcendental Time"). What is interesting about Husserl's discussion of passive synthesis (which he elaborates continuously from this point on in his work on "genetic phenomenology") is that this synthesis is a level of activity that precedes intentional directedness and is the condition of intentionality altogether. The question here revolves around that of sign-formation (generally an underexplored theme of Difference and Repetition... Deleuze discusses actualization in terms of the formation of signal-sign systems) and whether or not signs can cease to function as signs once they've been formed as signs through this synthesis of habitus. My point or question is that this form of synthesis is something other than the action of the signifier or the decision of an agent, though there is some parallel between Lacan's notion of the signifying chain as automaton and the Humean account of habits. This dimension of habitus is one of the reasons, I take it, that Deleuze and Guattari are so keen on focusing on the ecological and institutional spaces in which a body is housed (which are fields of repetition or spaces where the body contracts certain repetitive rythms and forms a particular response to them, somewhat like the sailor who develops a particular gait or stride as a result of having spent a life at sea) in understanding certain pathologies and why they are critical of focusing on the signifier alone. From a clinical perspective, the important point would be that the agency of the signifier is unable to effect these habits.

30 August 2006

Jesus is With You

A friend of mine sent me a link to these drawings of Jesus in ordinary life situations today. So I have to ask, are these a joke or did the artist genuinely intend them as devotional art? I recall years ago, as an annoying young man interested in disproving the existence of God, I took enjoyment in drawing absurd and disturbing consequences from the thesis that God is omnipresent. For intance, as omnipresent it clearly follows that God is there in the toilet when I defacate, etc. Clearly it's unacceptable to shit on God, but how could this possibly be avoided if God is omnipresent? And if God is not omnipresent, well that means he's finite and if he's finite then he's not God. Okay, sure, this kind of humor is crass and adolescent, but, well, I was an adolescent and this is how you console yourself when you're brought up in a city filled with self-righteous zealots doing their best to transform the educational system and city laws. Well it appears that this artist is striving to think precisely this.

I particularly liked the image of Jesus with the executive. Was Jesus with the executives in charge of Enron? Knowing a thing or two about religious ideology in the United States, I have little doubt that the executives of Enron themselves thought this. Of course, there's that monkey wrench surrounding all the communist teachings of Jesus and the early Christians. Perhaps Jesus whispers in their ears, diligently striving to persuade them to give up in their endless and ruthless pursuit and extraction of ever more surplus-value?

So really, are these drawings real or are they a joke? I'm particularly interested in what a Marxist analysis of contemporary religious phenomena might look like. What social forces, we might ask, have led to the resurgence of fundamentalist religious belief in the United States since the 70's? My money is on the thesis that fundamentalist religious belief has come to fill the vacuum left in the wake of the collapse of genuinely emancipatory political projects coupled with globalization, rendering all of us playthings of economic fate with little or no control of our own lives (it's not unusual, for instance, for those working in white collar jobs in the corporate sector to go through three or four job changes in the space of ten years due to layoffs and restructuring). With the collapse of emancipatory politics, we become Heideggerian: "Only a God can save us now." It's difficult not to get the impression that the omnipresent end of times fantasies present in contemporary American fundamentalist religious belief and cinema (Amageddon, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, the Terminator films, Dante's Peak, Volcano, coupled with the stunning success of Timothy LaHaye's Left Behind novels that can be found at supermarkets throughout the country, etc.) are indicative of a desire for the end or for some fundamental change... Who knows, perhaps films such as the Matrix trilogy and V for Vendetta are indicative that a new openness is beginning to be sensed and that we are collectively beginning to see the possibility of another way. In short, adopting a pseudo-Feuerbachian perspective, religious eschatology could be seen as an alienated desire pertaining to discontent with the social and a feeling of impotence with regard to our ability to change it.

29 August 2006

65. And the Author of nature has been able to employ this divine and infinitely wonderful power of art, because each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, as the ancients observed, but is also actually subdivided without end, each part into further parts, of which each has some motion of its own; otherwise it would be impossible for each portion of matter to express the whole universe. (Theod. Prelim., Disc. de la Conform. 70, and 195.)

66. Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls.

67. Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also some such garden or pond.

68. And though the earth and the air which are between the plants of the garden, or the water which is between the fish of the pond, be neither plant nor fish; yet they also contain plants and fishes, but mostly so minute as to be imperceptible to us.

69. Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion save in appearance, somewhat as it might appear to be in a pond at a distance, in which one would see a confused movement and, as it were, a swarming of fish in the pond, without separately distinguishing the fish themselves. (Theod. Pref. [E. 475 b; 477 b; G. vi. 40, 44].)

28 August 2006

A Film About What Zizek Calls "Sickening Jouissance":

Pay special attention to the scene near the end, in the Church, which might be compared with the end of The Ring in terms of its theses about jouissance and repetition (the film must be shown to others, i.e., the trauma repeated in order to escape the girl's jouissance), even though the films share nothing in common (there's no surprising twist).

A proposal for reading said film through the juxtaposition of the actual and the virtual:

ACTUAL

VIRTUAL

A nice line from Jodi Dean's Zizek's Politics:

Enjoyment, for Zizek, is a term of art, a technical, Lacanian concept that denotes an intense, excessive, pleasure-pain. Enjoyment by its very nature is excessive, something that can lure us into a kind of idiotic stupor or ecstatic state. Moreover, as I hope to make clear in this book, our relationship to enjoyment is never easy, never innocent. Enjoyment can be that extra kick on behalf of which we do our duty: "Sorry about that extra twenty dollars I tacked onto your ticket, ma'am, but, well, it's the law" or "These comments I wrote on your paper may seem cruel, but, well, it's really for your own good." (xvi)

A nice remark from Deleuze:

Bacon often explains that it [the isolation of figures] is to avoid the figurative, illustrative, and narrative character the Figure would necessarily have if it were not isolated. Painting has neither model to represent nor a story to narrate. It has thus two possible ways of escaping the figurative: toward pure form, through abstraction; or toward the purely figural, through extraction or isolation. If the painter keeps to the Figure, if he or she opts for the second path, it will be to oppose the "figural" to the figurative... The figurative (representation) implies the relationship of an image to an object that it is supposed to illustrate; but it also implies the relationship of an image to other images in a composite whole which assigns a specific object to each of them. Narration is the correlate of illustration. A story always slips into, or tends to slip into, the space between two figures in order to animate the illustrated whole. Isolation is thus the simplest means, necessary thought not sufficient, to break with representation, to disrupt narration, to escape illustration, to liberate the Figure: to stick to the fact. (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 2-3)

Isn't the figural succinct definition of jouissance as distinguished from the signifier? And aren't the tendrals of barbwire in the film a graphic figure of how jouissance winds its way throughout the world, perpetually setting social relations awry? That is, jouissance is precisely that which defies or falls outside the narrative function, and thereby functions as the motor of narrative (as narrative perpetually strives to gentrify it). This is one signification of the discourse of the master:

S1.....S2--......--$..//..a

Where objet a is the remainder of jouissance that perpetually escapes signification.

And finally a quote from Lacan on how ideology strives to manage or gentrify this excessive and individuating jouissance:

For what the unconscious does is to show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with a real-- a real that may well not be determined. (Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 22)

That is, he said, the unconscious introduces the figurative into the figure.

Relations, Elements, Multiplicity

Having gotten past my recent embarrassing and indiscrete outburst, I've been thinking, once again, about the relationship between Luhmann and Badiou. Incidentally, is there anyone else in the world that actually reads Luhmann? Jodi recently mentioned that she studied under one of his students, but generally I find reference to Luhmann almost completely absent everwhere (there are a couple of references in Lyotard, and a few highly positive references in Negri and Hardt's Empire, but other than that it is as if he doesn't exist in the United States). I find myself completely astonished by this state of affairs, and almost feel a missionary zeal to encourage interest in his work, as it so nicely ties together other themes in contemporary political theory and social thought. Or perhaps I'm just missing something. At any rate, early in his discussion of systems, Luhmann observes that,

Elements can be counted and the number of positive mathematical relations among them can be determined on the basis of their number. The enumeration reduces the relations among the elements to a quantitative expression, however. The elements acquire quality only insofar as they are viewed relationally, and thus refer to one another. this can occur in real systems of a (relatively small) size only selectively, that is, only by omitting other equally conceivable relations. Thus quality is possible only through selection-- but selection is necessary because of complexity. (Social Systems, 21)

I have been harping on this point a good deal recently, but the degree to which Luhmann's account of systems is the mirror of Badiou's ontology is remarkable. Imagine a collection of points. Each point can be related to every other point, in a way that we can describe exhaustively using mathematical terms. However, when dealing with the composition of any actual situation, we have only selective relations among elements, never a situation in which all elements are related. Systematicity just is the manner in which relations of elements are regulated. In Badiou's terms, this would be described in terms of the re-presentation (State) and presentation of a situation. For Badiou, the elements composing a situation are always in excess how the state re-represents the situation.

From the standpoint of contemporary social theory, Luhmann's thesis about relations and elements will not come as a surprise. By now everyone is familiar with the idea that there are no elements independent of relations and that there are no relations independent of elements. Everyone is familiar with the idea that systems constitute their own elements or that there are no elements independent of contingent systems. Indeed, what Luhmann presents is a highly formal, highly abstract, account of what figures such as Althusser, Foucault, Butler, etc., are up to with their critiques of essentialism, naturalization, and humanism. For instance, what we examine when we examine a Foucaultian episteme or power structure is simply the way in which a particular contingent system constitutes its elements (social subjects) and selectively regulates relations among these elements. Similarly, theoretical bodies such as psychoanalysis or schizoanalysis could be thought as examining the mechanisms by which which structural coupling takes place between organic systems falling outside social systems (human bodies) and social systems that draw on these organic systems as matter for the production of social elements.

What I find particularly interesting in Luhmann-Badiou's approach, however, is this excess, this multiplicity, that perpetually seems to haunt the elements and relations constituting a system. The impression I've often gotten when reading Althusser, Foucault, or Butler is one of grim determinism, where my being as a social being is so thoroughly pervaded by relations of power or ideology, that any action I undertake is already undertaken in the name of that power or ideology (since I myself, as an element of the social system, am nothing but the manner in which I have been constituted as an element). That is, there is a certain inevitability to social relations as theorized by these thinkers that leaves little hope of change or escape. However, in indicating this excess of mathematically computable relations over selectively governed relations, Luhmann-Badiou alludes to a chaos that perpetually haunts any organization-- mirroring, perhaps, what Deleuze-Simondon refers to as the "preindividual" or the "singular" --which provides a source of change and resistance. It is this excess that we witness in moments of revolution, orgiastic celebration, mob outbreaks, etc. In all of these instances, selective relational organizations break down, and we encounter something like a swarm without identity (the uncountable, the without-distinguishing-feature). By emphasizing the element of excess over organization, one gets the sense that perhaps certain questions have been posed in the wrong way, that there has been too much focus on organization and structure rather than what oozes out from the edges of systematicity. Perhaps it is in thinking the exess of possible relations over actual relations, that something like an Enlightenment subject becomes possible, a subject described by Zizek, when remarking that,

The cogitois not a substantial entity but a pure structural function, an empty place (Lacan's $)-- as such, it can emerge only in the interstices of substantial communal systems. The link between the emergence of the cogito and the disintegration and loss of substantial communal identities is therefore inherent, and this holds even more for Spinoza than for Descartes: although Spinoza criticized the Cartesian cogito, he criticized it as a positive ontological entity-- but he implicitly fully endorsed it as the "position of the enunciated," the one which speaks from radical self-doubting, since even more than Descartes, Spinoza spoke from the interstices of the social space(s), neither a Jew nor a Christian... (The Parallax View, 9)

...But a void. What Spinoza (or Descartes) was able to see as a result of their unique experience was the excess of multiplicity-- multiplicity qua multiplicity --underlying any social organization, or the bubbling chaos beneath social organizations. Descartes experienced this as a result of his extensive travels and wanderings, while Spinoza experienced that as a result of being excluded from both the Jewish and Christian communities of Amsterdam. In occupying this position, both Descartes and Spinoza were able to see the ultimate contingency of how social elements and their relations are organized, and thereby experience themselves as a pure void. In this regard, the mistake of critiques of the subject such as those found in Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, and Butler, is to suppose that it is a substantialist notion of the subject that is at stake in figures such as Descartes. These critiques end up replacing one substances (self-present res cogitans) with another substance-- social customs, habituations, language, power, intensities, etc. However, what is important in Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes is not their substantialist conception of subjectivity, but precisely their insight into the subject as void, empty, in disjunction with any possible predicate with which it might occupy. Is it not precisely for this reason that the idea of multitudes as a break from all tradition was formulable only by the thinkers of the Enlightenment? Doesn't the critique of these thinkers as presupposing a substantial subject determined by culture essentially miss the point... That the subject of Enlightenment was always a homeless subject, a subject that had lost it's tradition and home through it's very tradition? Would not the goal of a renewed Enlightenment thought be to become "a-topos"?

26 August 2006

Are Dialogue and Persuasion the Way?

Based on a recommendation by a good rhetorician friend of mine, I've picked up Sharon Crowley's Towards a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. It seems to me that this issue is one of the core political issues facing the United States political field today-- it is certainly one I grapple with on a daily basis with regard to both my students and administration --so I'm looking forward to what the author has to say. According to the blurb on the back of the book,

Toward a Civil Discourse examines how, in the current political climate, Americans find it dificult to discuss civic issues frankly and openly with one another. Because America is dominated by two powerful discourses-- liberalism [by this the author means the Enlightenment] and Christian fundamentalism, each of which paints a very different picture of America and its citizen's responsibilities --there is little common ground. The result is that civic discourse is frustated by incivility and impasse, as Americans avoid disagreement for fear of giving offense.

Sharon Crowly investigates the cultural factors that lead to the formation of beliefs, and how beliefs can develop into densely articulated systems and political activism. She asserts that retorical invention (which includes appeals to values and the passions) is superior in some cases to liberal argument (which often limits its appeals to empirical fact and reasoning) in mediating disagreements where participants are primarily motivated by moral or passionate commitment to beliefs.

Toward a Civil Discourse examines the consequences to society when, more often than not, argumentative exchange does not occur. Crowly underscores the urgency of developing a civil discourse, and through a review of historic rhetoric and its modern application, provides a foundation for such a discourse-- whose ultimate goal, in the tradition of the ancients, is democratic discussion of civic issues.

One of the things I find so refreshing about Badiou is his return to militant forms of engagement. Badiou often likes to quote Mao, remarking that "when you have an idea, the one becomes two". That is, ideas require you to take sides and to follow out the consequences of those ideas. Despite the fact that I had spent years studying the history of fascist and totalitarian movements, ideology, psychoanalysis, etc., I still found myself shocked at what happened to the United States after 9-11. Somehow, I think, I believed that the human race was, for the most part, fairly reasonable, that blind obediance and irrational hatred belonged only to the smallest fringe, and that the dark days of the red scare or the rise of the Nazis were behind us. I thought that the sort of mechanisms described in Orwell's 1984 only worked in fictional novels, and that the manipulation of media and passions certainly couldn't work in this day and age. After all, hadn't we learned the lessons of the past? I was blind.

This leads me to wonder: Perhaps the problem isn't one of finding a way to promote civil discourse or mediating disagreements at all. Perhaps the attempt to promote civil discourse simply maintains things as they are and actually works to the benefit of the fascists. Perhaps the entire problem is that a rather intellectually lazy and timid left in the United States 1) cringes at the thought of militantly taking sides as taking sides involves excluding others, of willing, in a very Nietzschean way, an affirmation that negates what can't be tolerably willed to return (this "left" has gotten better, but not by much. the party system is most certainly broken and beyond repair), and 2) believes that some sort of deliberative agreement is possible upon which to base governance. That is, doesn't Crowley's error lay in desiring civil discourse, rather than unapologetically defending her Enlightenment ideals and secularism, and willing the end of religious obscurantism altogether and fighting for that aim? Here the Christo-Nationalists (and no I do not believe all or even the majority of Christians fall into this group or are "religious obscurantists", so zip it with the defenses of Christianity and distracting remarks about how "not all Christians are like that", I'm not talking about you tender heart!) have the right idea. They do not seek to persuade everyone, they do not seek to find middle ground. And twisted though it may be, these groups thereby occupy the position of subjects (in Badiou's sense) or as engaged in politics (rather than statist deliberation). Instead of seeking middle ground, they militantly declare their positions and act on behalf of their axioms, come hell or high water. The recognize that the one becomes two and they will the end of that other side, the secular humanists. They act to try to bring about that end, by targeting the centers of subjectification such as schools, churches, media, etc., so as to produce non-secular subjects. Their aim does not consist in getting everyone to agree, but of establishing their power and transforming the very nature of the social field. They are not interested in compromise, but victory and triumph. They started small, initially being mocked and ignored, and now they are a huge movement, that has accrued a tremendous amount of governmental and economic power. Isn't this sort of unapologetic, militant commitment to the Enlightenment cause precisely what is lacking on the American left? Isn't there something forbidden in the idea of publically taking a stand and saying something like "this is nonsense" to the Christo-Nationalists that would rule our country, invade our bedrooms, and wage holy war?

Should the aim of political discourse be civil discourse? Does Habermas accurately describe political engagement? Or rather, is it precisely those who make no compromises, take no prisoners, and who unwaveringly commit themselves to their axioms and working out the implications of their axioms that ultimately produce change? In comparison to a "liberal rhetoric" [what Crowly describes] what does a militant rhetoric look like? What do you think?

25 August 2006

A Brief Note on the Virtual

It appears that there's a great deal of vagueness surrounding the use of the term "virtuality", and whenever it is evoked there is little that is specific said as to just what it is. As such, it is likely that there is a good deal of both false agreement and needless dispute, insofar as readers of Deleuze mean very different things by the term (especially since Difference and Repetition is so seldom read and there is an over-reliance on A Thousand Plateaus). First, let me once again emphasize that I fully agree with the claim that elements are nothing independent of their relations, and I have no problem advocating some version of potentiality or the idea that when matter encounters certain conditions new properties emerge. I have attempted to make this clear in foregoing posts, but apparently my commitment to an essentially relational conception of entity sans substance or atoms just isn't coming across. I don't think we need a special category of the virtual in order to advocate either of these theses.

I'm more skeptical of the thesis advanced by DeLanda, that the virtual is a modal category. I have been unable to find any evidence for this in my own close reading of Deleuze's work, and see this as one of DeLanda's liberties, where he attempts to push Deleuze's concept of singularities in the direction of the chaos-theoretical concept of "strange attractors". If one wishes to provide textual support for this thesis, then perhaps I will reconsider (incidentally, the claims drawn from Logic of Sense by Bobo pertaining to possible worlds do not here count, as Deleuze's thesis is not that these worlds described by Borges are virtual, but that all possible worlds obtain, as contrasted to the Leibnizian thesis that only the best of all possible worlds obtains. This thesis is quite distinct from the concerns of the virtual). However, there is some question of whether chaos theory requires a concept such as this. There is nothing mysterious about a basin of attraction. If I roll marbles down the edge of a bowl they tend to settle in the bottom. I don't need an additional dimension of the virtual to explain this type of an attractor, but can do so with ordinary cause and effect relations and discussions of force. Similarly in the case of strange attractors. Throughout DeLanda's Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy one gets the impression that he's trying to preserve the category of the virtual because Deleuze insists on it, despite the fact that intensive magnitudes such as the surface tension described in the case of the soap bubble appear capable of doing all the work one might desire in giving an account of individuation. Applying Ockham's razor, one thus wonders why we don't just instead drop the category altogether. One doesn't need the category of the virtual to argue that certain forms of relation only produce qualities or determinant values when reciprocally determined. Someone give me a real argument here that doesn't beg the question!

Nor, I think, do Nick's remarks about the virtual and mind answer the question, because Deleuze's claims about the virtual pertain to being qua being, not being qua minds. That is, Deleuze unlike Kant or early Heidegger is not interrogating Dasein's understanding of being or what being is for Dasein, nor how objects conform to mind, but is interrogating what being is for-itself. While it is certianly true that brain reduces disorder and imposes pattern on the world by selectively distinguishing information and ignoring other bits of information, Deleuze's claims about the virtual are not simply about minds relating to world but hold for any entity regardless of whether minds exist. We must thus resist the temptation to treat Deleuze in traditional subject/object terms. Deleuze, like Spinoza, is developing a classical metaphysics that does not begin with the question of how mind relates to world.

What I am unable to endorse, so far (and I've tried), is Deleuze's Bergsonism. Deleuze attributes four properties to memory. What's important to keep in mind here is that the memory that Deleuze is speaking of is not one belonging to human minds or animal minds or computer minds, etc. Deleuze-Bergson's thesis is that all beings unfold out of a pure ontological past that they actualize. Memory is a property of being, not of minds. Put otherwise, memory is not what neuropsychologists refer to as an engram or a trace, but is a property of matter itself. Deleuze, following Bergson, claims that ontological memory has four characteristics:

Contemporaneity-- According to Deleuze-Bergson, all of the past is contemporary with the present, such that the present is just the most contracted moment of the past. I am happy to agree that the present is always a product of the past, but I am tremendously uncomfortable with the thesis that the past is contemporaneous with the present in a manner that is perfectly preserved. When I remember I don't simply pull up a trace, but leap directly into the past itself. I place myself directly in the past.

Coexistence-- According to Deleuze-Bergson, all of the past co-exists with itself or is simultaneous with itself. Like Freud's description of the unconscious in terms of an ancient city in Civilization and its Discontents (cf. SE 21, 68-73), the entirety of the past co-exists with itself in a state that is perfectly current. Thus, for example, the first citizens of the city of Rome are still bustling about in a virtual dimension, as are every subsequent generation, up to today's actual dimension. It is not simply that this past is preserved in a memory, but rather that it is perfectly preserved and co-exists with ever other level of the past (cf. the Bergson's cone of memory).

The Pre-Existence of the Past-- However, Deleuze's thesis isn't simply that the past is preserved, that it is contemporary with the present and that it co-exists with itself. Rather, Deleuze goes one step further and claims that the past pre-exists the present. That is, the past isn't constituted after the present as a copy of the present (an engram, a trace), rather the past exists prior to the present such that the present follows from the past and is actualized out of the past.

The Co-Existence of the Past with the Present-- Finally, the entirety of the past co-exists with the present such that the present is the most contracted state of the past. This is another way of saying that the present itself is the past. As I pointed out in a previous post, Deleuze remarks that the present is not and the past is. We can now see why. If the present is the most contracted state of the past, then it itself is the past and not the present. Indeed, there's no longer a present at all.

As I remarked, I have tried diligently to find reasons to endorse these theses or to determine why someone would endorse these theses. I understand the paradoxes of movement that Bergson develops in his discussions of Zeno and why he believes that he must necessarily endorse claims of an ontological past in order to explain how movement is possible (without falling into Zeno's traps), but certainly there must be a better solution to these questions. Try as I might, I simply cannot bring myself to accept the thesis that the past is anything more than an engram or trace in a neural system (or some equivalent) that perpetually reproduces itself across time through its own operations. What I cannot accept is that the past is. I have no difficulty accepting the thesis that certain relations only take on value in relation to one another (dy/dx), that they are nothing in themselves (dy is nothing in relation to y), and that matter is characterized by potentiality. But these claims can be made independent of any reference to a pure past as Deleuze outlines it in Difference and Repetition, and indeed we see these claims largely disappear in subsequent work (Deleuze even entitles a section of A Thousand Plateaus "Memories of a Former Bergsonian"). The real question to be asked is what problem does the category of the virtual respond to. This should be formulated in as concrete and explicit terms as possible (e.g., "it explains how creativity is possible" doesn't do the trick and is the mantra of the cult of Deleuze, not a genuine effort to trace the geneology of this concept). Here it would be productive to carefully analyze Zeno's paradoxes, from whence Bergson draws his inspiration. It should then be asked whether other solutions to this problem are possible.

Finally, any analysis of this concept should be based on close textual reading, not a desire to discern some prescient foresight into contemporary science in Deleuze's ontology. For instance, DeLanda's claim that the virtual is a "modal category" despite the fact that there is virtually no textual support (pardon the pun) to support this thesis and that Deleuze's heavy reliance on Bergson and Simondon in the formulation of the virtual even counts against this thesis. There is a strange tendency in the secondary literature on Deleuze to desire translating his work into other terms such as chaos theory, complexity theory, evolutionary theory, even quantum mechanics (DeLanda, Massumi, Pearson, Protevi, etc). One does not find a similar tendency in scholarship surrounding other thinkers such as Heidegger, Badiou, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Marion, Zizek, and so on. I take this as a symptom that something is amiss with Deleuze. A thinker should be able to speak on his own terms and not require translation (support?) of a body of language as if to say "this is what x is really saying, he doesn't really mean a, b, and c". Indeed, with some of the secondary literature there's even the occasional sense that there's a prohibition against speaking directly about the Deleuzian text, as a violation of some imperative to "be creative and create monsters" (Massumi), such that Deleuze comes to mean whatever one wants him to mean and it thereby becomes futile to talk about Deleuze at all. On the one hand, I take this tendency to be indicative of a deep unease with something Deleuze is claiming (but which remains unarticulated), as if "saying that" would be unacceptable; while on the other hand, I take it that there is clearly something worth preserving in Deleuze, that there's clearly something that he hit on, but that it needs to be separated from this other element. In fact, we could go one step further and declare, after the fashion of Lacan's return to Freud, that there needs to be a return to Deleuze. However, here we would have to note how Lacan approached his return to Freud-- Gone were all the energetic metaphors, the ancestral memory, literal fear of castration, etc that dot the Freudian corpus. For a traditional Freudian, Lacan's Freud is largely unrecognizable yet still Lacan somehow manages to catch what Freud was trying to say without being able to say it. And it seems that something like this is also suggested in elements of Massumi's, DeLanda's, Pearson's, and Protevi's readings of Deleuze without quite being able to discard all the chaff and formulate a new ontology of Deleuzian inspiration. That is, there's still too much attachment to Deleuze as the "master". Rather than making Deleuze say what I would like him to say and ignoring what I take to be downright lunacy, I am instead trying to get clear on just what I find amiss in his thought and what I see as worth preserving.

Numbers or Things?-- Yes, Please!

In reflecting on the debate between Deleuze and Badiou, my thoughts have turned to Hegel's dialectic of quantum in The Science of Logic (cf. pgs. 202-313). In these passages it seems to me that Hegel all but anticipates the split between the respective ontologies of Deleuze and Badiou. This dialectic can be situated in terms of Hallward's discussion of Badiou's fundamental ontological decision in Badiou: A Subject to Truth. In a subsection to chapter 3, Hallward argues that the fundamental decision of any ontology begins with a decision as to what is first or more fundamental: numbers or things? The first orientation is, of course, that of Plato, where eidos constitutes true reality and the world of objects about us is composed of illusory and fleeting appearances from which thought must depart if it is to find truth, whereas the second is that of Aristotle where all thought begins with "primary substances" or individuals, and "things" such as numbers are merely constructions or abstractions of mind, not truly existing beings. In this second orientation, there is truth only insofar as it refers back to the buzzing world of objects.

Badiou's own neoplatonic option, then, implies (at various stages of the argument) the destitution of the old categories 'substance,' 'thing,' 'object,' and 'relation'; the ontological primacy of mathematical over physical reality; the distinction of mathematics from logic and the clear priority of the former over the latter. In this Platonic tradition, that mathematics is a form of thought means, first of all, that it 'breaks with sensory immediacy,' so as to move entirely within the pure sufficiency of the Ideal. Badiou refuses any cosmological-anthropological reconciliation, any comforting delusion that there is some deep connection (such as that proposed by Jung and his followers) between our ideas or images and the material world we inhabit... His ontology everywhere presumes the radical cut of symbolic representation from the nebulous cosmos of things and experiences that was first proposed by Descartes and subsequently given a particularly strident formulation by Lacan, who insists again and again that we 'can only think of language as a network, a net over the entirety of things, over the totality of the real' (S1, 399/262)... 'Reality is at the outset marked by symbolic neantisation,' and as Badiou confirms, every 'truth is the undoing, or defection, of the object of which it is a truth. .' In particular, 'all scientific progress consists in making the object as such fade away,' and replacing it with symbolic-mathematical constructions. (53)

Badiou's point is very simple. The first step in science, according to this orientation, consists in no longer trusting in appearances. It is by turning away from appearances that scientific knowledge becomes possible. The most striking example of this is seen with regard to the shift from Ptolemy to Copernicus, where the appearance of how the sun and stars moves certain supports the geocentric hypothesis of Ptolemy, but where Copernicus' break with appearances is what first sets us on the path of getting things right with regard to planetary motion. While I'm more than sympathetic to the jab taken at Jung here, I wonder if this is truly an accurate characterization of science. It is certainly true that there is no science without mathematization, but can science do away with the object in the way that Hallward and Badiou here propose? Can science proceed on the basis of mathematization alone? As I tried to argue in a previous post, Badiou's ontology runs into problems when dealing with questions of the relationship between the pure order of being (multiplicity qua multiplicity) and actual situations. What Badiou lacks is any sort of explanatory principle that would allow us to understand why one situation arises rather than another situation from the infinite field of pure multiplicty belonging to ontology. The mathematical enthusiasts of Badiou have sternly lectured me for asking such an impudent question when mathematicians are only interested in studying the formal structure of numbers (is this use of mathematics a new rhetorical strategy?), but when Badiou argues that number is being and that it is of the essence of being to appear as a situation, then he has shifted from a discussion of purely formal, deductive, and possible fields explored with the sovereignity of thought by mathematicians, to a field of actuality that cannot be deduced. The question now becomes unavoidable, and it becomes clear that there is a difference between the materiality of a situation and the "materiality" of mathematics.

What is interesting here is that the debate between Badiou and Deleuze concerning quantitative and qualitative multiplicities closely mirrors Hegel's dialectic of quantum. In treating the dialectic of quantum, Hegel distinguishes between extensive magnitudes and intensive magnitudes. In an articulation of this distinction that is almost identical to Deleuze-Bergson's distinction between quantitative and qualitative multiplicities, the difference between extensive and intensive magnitudes lies in the fact that the former can be divided without changing in kind, whereas the latter cannot be divided without changing in kind. Thus, for instance, no matter how much I divide a bit of space (say my study), I still get more spatial units of measure such that this space is composed of those units of space; however, when dealing with intensive magnitudes such as boiling water, I cannot meaningfully suggest that this magnitude is composed of all the lower temperatures below it. Rather, an intensive magnitude such as boiling is a sort of indivisible and irreducible threshold at which things occur. Hegel goes on to argue that this distinction is, in fact, artificial and that we cannot properly think these two sorts of magnitudes apart:

...it is quite correct that there are no merely intensive and merely extensive magnitudes, any more than there are merely continuous and merely discrete ones; and hence, these two determinations of quantity are not independent species that confront one another. Any intensive magnitude is also extensive, and conversely. So, a certain degree of temperature, for instance, is an intensive magnitude, to which, as such, there corresponds a wholly simple sensation; and if we then go to the thermometer we find a certain expansion of the column of mercury corresponds to this degree of temperature, and this extensive magnitude changes together with the temperature taken as an intensive magnitude. It is the same in the domain of spirit, too; a more intense character exerts influence over a wider range than a less intense one. (The Encyclopaedia Logic, Geraets trans., 164-5)

It is not difficult to see that Badiou has sought to comprehend being purely in terms of extensive magnitudes, whereas Deleuze has sought to understand the world purely in terms of intensive magnitudes. For Deleuze, for instance, we must understand the manner in which a soap bubble individuates itself as resulting from an equalization of intensive magnitudes or surface tensions among the molecules composing the bubble. I understand an entity when I understand the intensities to which the actualized entity is a response or solution. These intensities are the dynamic factor driving system organization. Badiou, by contrast, is able to arrive at the idea that being is pure multiplicity without one because, when we focus on extensive magnitude alone we can endlessly divide any set (take the subsets of any set) without ever reaching a final set or ultimately primitive set. As such, being becomes pure dissemination without one. In Badiou's case, it is interesting to note that in his most recent work, Logiques des mondes, he has been forced to extensively discuss intensity to account for the structure of worlds or situations. Unfortunately, Badiou's concept of intensity pertains to the degree to which elements appear in a situation, rather than serving an energetic function presiding over the actualization of a new organization. For instance, in the situation comprising the United States it could be said that those elements called "leftist" are an intensity of a very low degree as there is very little in the way of a genuine leftist discourse or movement in the United States (even those who say they are on the left in the Democratic party are generally concervatives or supporters of the state... which have a very high degree of intensity by being more predominantly present in the U.S. situation). It's clear that this concept of intensity is radically different than that advocated by Deleuze or Hegel.

Yet it is necessary to wonder whether Badiou's characterization of science is accurate. Can science proceed as pure mathematization, making no reference to intensive magnitudes? Perhaps this holds for astronomy, where we describe planetary motion without referring to intensive factors, but certainly disciplines such as quantum mechanics or chemistry would be all but impossible if we didn't take into account intensive magnitudes. Moreover, I am not at all clear that this is an accurate picture of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan certainly advocated the mathematization of psychoanalytic concepts, but it must never be forgotten that these concepts take their sense and orientation from the clinic. If it were not for variations in intensity, I could never locate, for instance, the objet a or a particularly significant signifier... These instances are accompanied by affect presented in the speech and behavior of the analysand (think of the Rat Man's violent gestures and his famous facial expression portraying a "horror at an enjoyment of which he was unaware" that came to function as the ciphered key to his entire analysis), that cannot be strictly mathematized.

What I find interesting in reading the Deleuze-Badiou debate revolving around extensive and intensive multiplicities as mirroring Hegel's dialectic of quantum is that the dialectic of quantum is the final moment of the broader dialectic of being in the "Logic of Being" portion of the Science of Logic. Those familiar with the Science of Logic will recall that this final moment resolves itself in the dialectic of measure, which then passes over into the the doctrine of essence, or relation and appearing. That is, by following the paths of Hegel (and I'm certainly not suggesting becoming Hegelian or that there is some inherent telos at work here in these debates), it might prove possible to productively think Deleuze and Badiou together, formulating an ontology of essence or appearing that goes beyond both of their positions. What this would be, I'm not exactly sure. At the very least, when offered alternatives such as that proposed by Hallward or Badiou between number and thing, I'm led to wonder why I should have to choose exclusively for one at all.

Of the Reproduction of Structural Relations

Althusser famously argued that ideology isn't simply a false consciousness or mistaken belief about the truth of our social relations, but rather that ideology is the means by which a social system reproduces its conditions of production. What Althusser saw so clearly was that social relations perpetually need to reproduce themselves if societies are to persist across time. In this regard, the biological organism ordinarily referred to as "human" is not sufficient to constitute a social system. As the example of the feral child demonstrates, there's little resembling a person in a child raised outside a social network system. Rather, this organism must undergo a process of individuation that constitutes it as a social subject or an en-bodiment of social relations. (Incidentally, I also think this responds to Nick's concerns about solipsism or communication, raised by Peter Hallward in Out of This World, over at the brilliant blog "The Accursed Share". Insofar as individuation always occurs within a mileux or what Luhmann calls an "environment", there can be no question of an inside unable to communicate with an outside. In Hegelian terms, that conception that treats the relation of the individuated individual to its mileux or environment as an external relation, is "abstract" and fails to see that the individual is only individuated in drawing a distinction between itself and an environment. Rather, the inside is itself constituted in relation to this outside, which includes other persons in its environment. This is the significance of Lacan's understanding of the operations of alienation and separation and the constitution of the subject in the field of the Other, which is essentially a thesis about the structural coupling of a merely biological organism to a social world that precipitates a subject. As Bruce Fink expresses this point in The Lacanian Subject, a subject is a particular way of relating to or orientation towards the Other. Subjects are individuated in the mileux of the Other and forever retain the trace of this ongoing individuation in much the same way that the trees behind my home retain the trace of wind and weather patterns here in Texas. Moreover, fundamental fantasy can be seen as the particular strategy a subject has "emerged" for provoking certain perturbations/responses to the ideal Other the subject is structurally coupled to. This would explain why there is no such thing as "self-analysis" in psychoanalysis, and how analysis is a technique for transforming the structural coupling organizing a particular subject by creating a situation in which particular responses in the Other are not where the subject expects them to be. The analyst is that person who is there on the essential condition of not being there and who resembles a person without being one. It is for this reason that an analyst is able to assist in the precipitation of new subjectivities, as s/he doesn't play the systemic game-- the structural coupling --that organizes regular social interactions).

Regardless of what one might think about the particulars of Althusser's theory of ideology, what is interesting here is that structures must perpetually reproduce themselves across time through mechanisms that bring human organisms to em-body these relations in a system of attitudes, postures, identities, and dispositions of action. Human organisms must be constituted as subjects, and apparently social relations only exist in and through the productive activity of interpellated subjects. In this regard, Althusser functions as a necessary corrective to structuralist conception of organization that tended to see structures as functioning of their own accord, forming some new third type of entity or being that is neither subject nor object, but which overdetermines both. As I argued in a previous post on Deleuze, it was this latter conception of structure that initially motivated Deleuze's category of the virtual, for the concept of structure requires us to determine how, precisely, it's possible for synchronous structural relations to exist in a world of actuality that unfolds diachronously.

However, the idea of structure reproducing itself in and through the actions of its elements (social subjects in Althusser's case) promises the possibility of dispensing with the metaphysically idiosyncratic conception of the virtual, so as to think the world purely in terms of actuality. It is Luhmann who best describes this possibility:

One of the most important results of this encounter [of sociology with systems theory]... resides in the radical temporalization of the concept of element. The theory of self-producing, autopoietic systems can be transferred to the domain of action systems only if one begins with the fact that the elements composing the system can have no duration, and thus must be constantly reproduced by the system these elements comprise. This goes far beyond merely replacing defunct parts, and it is not adequately explained by referring to environmental relationships. It is not a matter of adaptation, nor is it a matter of metabolism; rather, it is a matter of a peculiar constraint on autonomy arising from the fact that the system would simply cease to exist in any, even the most favorable, environment if it did not equip the momentary elements that compose it with the capacity for connection, that is, with meaning, and thus reproduce them. (Social Systems, 11)

What counts as an element must be specified for each type of system analyzed. For instance, human beings are not elements of a social system. Rather, subjects are elements of a social systems. The social system constitutes human beings as subjects or elements of the social system. Put a bit differently, we can say that the social system uses human beings as the material by which to produce social subjects. In Badiou's language, it is not human beings that are counted by the social system, but rather subjects. It is for this reason that it is said that humans are not elements of a social system. Ellison's Invisible Man, for instance, might be seen as a novel about a man who experiences the split between how the social system counts him as a member and his status as a human being or individual, which isn't counted at all.

What we have here is the thesis that elements of a system are perpetually being reproduced across time through the actions of those elements with respect to one another, which amounts to a dynamic stability. For example, in being counted under the class element "professor", there is no intrinsic or enduring property that makes me a teacher. Rather, I am perpetually being constituted as professor by my own actions, the actions of my students with regard to me, the actions of the administration, other professors, and the actions of the community in which I teach. All of these processes must be perpetually renewed and repeated to constitute me as a particular type of element, just as the cells of a biological organism are perpetually producing themselves, producing other cells, and being produced by other cells. The structural relations defining identity are thus the results of ongoing activity that has its center and origin nowhere, but where identities can only be seen as an emergent result borne of certain relations. Consequently, we have a paradox in which elements are both constituted and constituting, where they are both products of a system and productive of system. In conceptualizing organization in this way, we are able to dispense with the unlateral determination of the actual by the virtual as thematized by Deleuze, replacing it with a model where events occuring among the elements can have an effect on structural organization (feedback loops). We also get a picture of how structural drift occurs over time, through systemic variations and with an "encounter" with the environment (allowing for a reconciliation of Badiou and Deleuze, where Deleuze's thematization of the "encounter" in Difference and Repetition can be seen as serving a role analogous to that of Badiou's event). It's also worth noting that this account of emergent elements accords nicely with Badiou's ontology of inconsistent multiplicities, and overcomes the descriptivism Hallward criticizes Badiou for in Logiques des mondes (in Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Hallward argues that Badiou's use of category theory might describe social structures or organizations, but it doesn't explain them or their mechanisms). Such an approach also explains why we never see perfect embodiments of structure, but always fuzzy variations approaching a statistical norm without encapsulating an absolute mechanistic determinism (a point sometimes ignored by structuralists in their heyday). Finally, we are able to see structural organization as a way of maintaining boundaries in a distinction between system and environment, by drawing a distinction between system and environment (a system, as articulated by Luhmann, perpetually reproduces a distinction between system and environment, or inside and outside, as a way of producing itself across time). As Luhmann puts it, "Systems must cope with the difference between identity and difference when they reproduce themselves as self-referential systems; in other words, reproduction is the management of this difference" (10). In short, one of the central questions of politics becomes that of how this management of identity and difference can be transformed. No longer is the question one of simply changing structure, but rather it becomes one of changing the relationship of structure (system) to its outside or environment (how structure reproduces the difference between identity and difference). What we would have here, then, would be an ontological vision that preserves Deleuze's key intuitions without forcing us to commit to some of the more eccentric aspects of his ontology (it's Bergsonism, ontological memory, the virtual, etc).

Thoburn-- Deleuze, Marx, and Politics

Eric, over at I Cite, has directed me to Thoburn's Deleuze, Marx, and Politics as presenting a viable picture of Deleuze's political thought. While I've drawn a good deal of inspiration from Deleuze as a thinker of complex dynamical systems or dynamic evolving stability, I've been less enthusiastic about his political thought, or even whether one can draw a coherent political project from his work with Guattari. It was this dissatisfaction that led me to thinkers such as Badiou and Ranciere. Simply put, unbridled creation and unlimited desiring-machines do not a politics make. While such may be appealing to the hipsters, there is little concrete that can be drawn from such premises. But perhaps I'm mistaken and have rashly rejected Deleuze's work with Guattari out of sour grapes that they authorized an entire generation of cultural studies theorists to reject psychoanalysis in an uninformed and knee-jerk fashion. Over the next few weeks I plan to go through Thoburn's work to see if this is the case.

23 August 2006

Against Theory

Over at Acephalous, Scott has written a piece on why he doesn't do theory. I have heard remarks like these from a number of quarters-- though usually made by people from a certain reactionary contingent in English departments that resents having to be aware of theory (in contrast to these reactionaries, English departments deserve a good deal of credit for preserving what's left of continental thought in the United States, where philosophy departments largely dropped the ball) --and find myself thoroughly perplexed whenever I hear them. From a Kantian or Luhmannian point of view, every person observes the world from the perspective of a particular frame and based on a particular set of distinctions. As the Anglo-American philosophers who trained me used to say, "all observation is theory laden", and every judgment about a state of affairs in the world already presupposes a particular theory of how the world is. If I conclude that my partner is possessed because she is speaking in tongues, frothing at the mouth, and seeing things that I cannot see, my judgment presupposes a theory of the nature of the world, of the "ontological furniture" of reality (that it includes things such as demons, devils, souls that can be possessed, etc), and of how that reality is (that these spirits are concerned about human existence; there not being, as Epicurus famously pointed out, any a priori reason to believe the God(s) are concerned with the doings of humans at all). Such theory laden observation is unavoidable. When I view my partner behaving in this way, I conclude something quite different: that she is having a seizure, that perhaps she has a psychosis, etc. So what could it possibly mean to "not do theory"? Isn't the claim that "one does not do theory" simply equivalent to arguing that one does not make the premises of their own theoretical universe explicit or meditate on their own theoretical assumptions about the world? How is it possible to read texts, analyze the world about us, etc., without implicitly employing a theoretical frame of some sort? In approaching any text, do I not already make an entire host of assumptions as to what a text is, what meaning is, what interpretation is, etc? I most often hear these sorts of remarks coming from those who advocate some sort of historicism. However, isn't historicism an ontological theory of what makes things-- texts, peoples, scientific disciplines --what they are? Doesn't the historicist proceed on the theory that for anything that is or has taken place, for any situation, it's being can be exhaustively explained by its historical context as an emergent product of that context? Deleuze and Badiou's ontologies could thus be seen as militantly rejecting this [Foucaultian/Gadamerian] hypothesis.

Wouldn't it be more accurate [and honest] to say "I don't do a particular type of theory?" Approaching this question from the standpoint of the play of the signifier [the unconscious being structured like a language], I suspect that at the level of the unconscious the signifier "theory" is functioning a bit like it does for creationist fundamentalists in the American evolution debate, when it is declared that "Students should understand that evolution is a theory and not fact". Whenever it is declared that one doesn't do theory-- usually by "hard nosed positivists", historicists, or pragamatists --it seems to me that lurking in the background is the thesis that theory is somehow the "unproven" or undemonstrated, whereas the good historicist or positivist is just dealing with hard-nosed historical facts or sense-data. In short, the Quinean point that facts are functions of theories and theories are functions of facts (in endless feedback loops) is ignored, and the person rejects "mere theory" with an air of superiority (that I would call reflexive blindness).

Three questions then:

1) What is meant by theory when someone says "I don't do theory"?

2) Is it possible to not do theory and what does such an activity look like?

3) What desire animates the desire not to do theory? Isn't the desire to "not do theory" a figure of reaction? Isn't it precisely theory that allows us to begin escaping the constraints of our historical and ideological situation?

21 August 2006

Deleuze's Two Conceptions of the Virtual

In response to Kushakov's defense of Deleuze's category of the virtual, I would like to clarify both what I reject in Deleuze's account of the virtual and what I wish to preserve in the category of the virtual. At the outset, I should remark that I find Kushakov's discussion of the virtual unrecognizable, and am certainly unable to agree with his claim that "the virtual [is] that which is simultaneously outside the category of being - that which cannot be brought into either infinite set - and upon which the possibility of being depends." The problem is that this violates both the univocity and immanence claims of Deleuze's ontology. Moreover, if we follow Deleuze's equation of the virtual with Bergsonian memory as elaborated in Bergsonism, it is the virtual that truly is. As Deleuze there puts it,

We have...confused Being with being-present. Nevertheless, the present is not; rather, it is pure becoming, always outside itself. It is not; but it acts. Its proper element is not being but the active or useful. The past, on the other hand, has ceased to act or be useful. But it has not ceased to be. Useless and inactive, impassive, it IS, in the full sense of the word: it is identical with being in itself. (Bergsonism, 55)

Employing Deleuze's sorting of time as developed in The Logic of Sense, it is thus not the case that the actual is sorted in two ways. Rather, the actual corresponds to chronos or the pure present which is not, and the virtual corresponds to aion or that which divides time into past and future. Deleuze had already developed this sorting of time when discussing the second and third syntheses of repetition (pure past and eternal return) as the dimension of the virtual. For instance, Deleuze's discussion of Oedipus and Hamlet closely mirrors his discussion of aion in the 23rd series of The Logic of Sense. In any case, Deleuze-Bergson's thesis is that this pure past is the condition for actualization. Or, put differently, aion is the condition of chronos. Or, yet again, the virtual is the condition of the actual. What I object to in Deleuze is thus two-fold: On the one hand, I reject his thesis about the inactivity or impassivity of the virtual (this is the driving point of Hallward's entire critique which I discuss here). On the other, I reject Deleuze's thesis that there is something like an ontological memory or pure past, detached from any subjects, that inheres in all being, in favor of a materialist position that sees the present as perpetually reproducing itself or rather which discerns being as composed entirely of actuality. This, of course, is a thesis that I am obligated to work out and develop.

While I reject Deleuze's Bergsonian conception of the virtual in terms of an impassive, pure past where the entirety of the past co-exists both with itself and with the present, I do, nonetheless, believe that there is a virtuous conception of the virtual that responds to a very real problem. Deleuze taught that to understand a philosophy or a concept, we must seek to understand the problem to which it responds. It was this, primarily (and not buggary), that defined his "method" of reading philosophy. For Deleuze the question was always what unspoken problem animates this particular constellation of concepts, this particular configuration of thought? Similarly, we can ask what particular problem motivates Deleuze's conceptualization of the virtual? To what problem does it respond? In order to answer this question a close reading of Difference and Repetition is required, and in particular chapters four and five. Indeed, I would say that the measure of any reading of Deleuze is found in what it has to say about chapters four and five of Difference and Repetition, and whether it attempts to reduce all of Deleuze to the first synthesis of repetition or habitus (a tendency so common in the secondary literature as to cause one to throw one's hands up in despair, shaking one's head in wonder at the fact that readers ignore Deleuze's comments as to how habitus underlies the image of thought and the model of recognition).

I cannot provide such a reading here, but I will say that Deleuze's account of the virtual is designed to account for the manner in which a discrete entity or being (an actuality) is the product or effect of a structure or system, whether this system be a social system, a lingustic system, a kinship system, a biological system, an ecosystem, etc., etc. Yes, yes, I know Deleuze ultimately comes to reject structuralism and level trenchant critiques against a number of structuralist thinkers. However, this was not always the case for Deleuze (cf. his early essay "How Do We Recognize Structuralism?" in Desert Island and Other Texts, where you will be treated to a neat summary of many of the themes of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense), who recognized early the ontological challenges posed by structuralist thought. It was precisely his attempt to produce a philosophy proper to structuralism that eventually allowed him to break with structuralism, moving in a direction closer to chaos and complexity theory. Although it is seldom discussed, the emergence of structuralism in the social sciences also gave rise to new ontological questions that could no longer be summed up in a metaphysics where the principle kinds of things that are consist of only subjects and objects. Social structures are not in any one person's mind, nor are they objects that we can observe in the world around us. Rather, they are some strange third thing that is neither subject nor object. And indeed, if we take Althusser's claims about interpellation seriously (while adding bells and whistles), both subjects and objects are dependent on these structures. Setting aside Deleuze's later critique of structuralism (his work during the sixties is staunchly structuralist), it can be said that Deleuze set out to theorize these structures.

Take the example of language. We say that langue is the condition of parole. Without language there is no speech. Thus, when I say to a friend "please leave me alone", this enunciation isn't possible with a prior shared system of language. There is a condition upon which this enunciation depends and that condition is language. Yet where is language? If language is as Saussure describes it (or as described by the linguist Labov, whom Deleuze and Guattari will come to endorse in A Thousand Plateaus), then language qua language is something that can't be heard (as it's composed of pure differences or phonemes such as b/p), it can't be seen, it can't be touched, it can't be found in any particular object in the way that we might discern a quality such as red belonging to a ball. Moreover, language has the strange quality of being discontinuous in time. For instance, the entire world could cease to speak, yet the languages of the world would not cease to be. How is this possible? Now I only offer this as an example of how to conceive the problem Deleuze is responding to, and ask irate desiring-machines not to give me a lecture on how Deleuze and Guattari throw Saussure to the flames in their essay "The Postulates of Linguistics". Yes, yes, I'm familiar with all of this, but that's not the point. The point to focus on is the question of how a discrete being can nonetheless have a relational structure. (Incidentally, it will be noted that conservativism is almost invariably characterized by an inability to discern relations or instances of a relation in actual phenomena, treating discrete actuality as if it were all that is and ignoring the manner in which actualities embody systematicity and belong to broader organizational patterns). How is it possible for something to be a condition of beings (the beings in this instance consisting of speech-events), while not being discernible or measurable, or being located in any one particular person's mind (an issue that becomes even more remarkable when we're no longer dealing with social phenomena, but biological entities, weather patterns, ecosystems, etc)?

It is precisely these ontological problems that Deleuze seeks to articulate with his account of the virtual. That is, how are we simultaneously able to think the continuous and the discontinuous together? The key passage occurs in chapter four of Difference and Repetition, "Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference":

We opposed the virtual and the real: although it could not have been more precise before now, this terminology must be corrected. The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual. Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: 'Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract'; and symbolic without being fictional. Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the object-- as thought the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension. Accounts of the differential calculus often liken the differential to a 'portion of the difference'. Or, following Lagrange's method, the question is asked which part of the mathematical object presents the relation in question and must be considered derived. The reality of the virtual consists in differential elements and relations along with the singular points which correspond to them. The reality of the virtual is structure. We must avoid giving the elements and relations which form a structure an actuality which they do not have, and withdrawing from them a reality which they have. We have seen that a double process of reciprocal determination and complete determination defined that reality: far from being determined, the virtual is completely determined. When it is claimed that works of art are immersed in a virtuality, what is being invoked is not some confused determination but the completely determined structure formed by its genetic differential elements, its 'virtual' or 'embryonic' elements. The elements, varieties of relations and singular points coexist in the work or the object, in the virtual part of the work or object, without it being possible to designate a point of view privileged over others, a centre which would unify the other centres. How, then, can we speak simultaneously of both complete determination and only a part of the object? The determination must be a complete determination of the object, yet form a part of it. Following suggestions made by Descartes in his Replies to Arnaud, we must carefully distinguish the object in so far as it is complete and the object insofar as it is whole. What is complete is only the ideal part of the object, which participates with other parts of objects in the Idea (other relations, other singular points), but never constitutes an integral whole as such. What the complete determination lacks is the whole set of relations belonging to actual existence. An object may be ens, or rather (non)ens omni modo determinatum, without being entirely determined or actually existing. (DR, 208-9)

The virtual is thus that half of the object that presides over its being or actuality. What the virtual explains is how a discrete ("unconnected") actuality, entity, or being, can nonetheless belong to one and the same relational structure or system. Thus, for instance, my remark to my friend-- "leave me alone" --is a discrete actuality, a unique speech-event isolated from other speech-events, but belongs to the system of the English language. Similarly, the specific color of my eyes are discrete in the order of being or distinct from other entities (other parts of my own body, other human bodies, animal bodies, etc), but nonetheless are actualizations of my genetic structure. Deleuze's account of (indi)different/ciation in chapters four and five of Difference and Repetition is thus designed to account for how we move from this virtual domain of ideal relations and singularities characterizing a system, to unique actualized entities. Moreover, we can see why Deleuze would find Bergson's account of the pure past attractive in developing an ontology of structures and systems as they relate to discrete actualities, insofar as the relations composing a system or structure are simultaneous with one another, yet time experienced at the level of actuality is experienced as perpetually passing. The pure past is one way to explain how organization, system, structure can persist in time despite the fact that actualities are constantly moving about and reorganizing themselves.

I take it that Deleuze's account of the virtual as structure or system is the "virtuous" conception of the virtual, and the one that has been so quickly latched on to by thinkers such as Negri and Hardt. That is, I take it that describing the virtual as the "relational side" of the object is a productive idea. Nonetheless, I am uncomfortable with Deleuze's proposal of an impassive ontological memory or pure past that insists in all actuality. I am also bothered by Deleuze's claim that the actual contributes nothing to the virtual, but rather that all actualization moves from the virtual to the actual. This seems to leave little hope for any sort of concrete change produced at the level of actuality, insofar as we have a pure past, a past that has never been present, overdetermining all actualities without the actualities themselves contributing anything to being. It seems to me that this is the Deleuze, the Deleuze of the ontology of the pure past, that most Deleuzians themselves ignore, treating Deleuze instead as a sort of complexity theorist.

What if, however, we could account for the relational dimension of beings coupled with their discreteness without having to evoke something like a pure past? What if we could account for this relational dimension of all discrete entities sheerly in terms of actuality? In Social Systems, Luhmann has proposed that systems are entirely composed of events that cease to exist the moment they occur. That is, there is no substance in which systems inhere. As a result, the challenge of every system consists in the question of how it is able to perpetually reproduce itself from moment to moment. What are those events that generate connectivity to other events? Is there a way of conceiving being such that being reproduces itself at every moment in its relational organization, allowing us to dispense with strange ontologies that would require us to claim that the past IS? Could not organization, systematicity, be seen as an emergent property of elements, rather than as the result of another dimension called the virtual?